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Took 70-113 beta exam today...anybody else?

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Okay, so I won't go much into what the actual content of the exam is, but it's two 1 hour timed full VM labs followed by 37 questions in hte usual format. 4 hour time slot

Now don't get me wrong, the idea to deter braindumpers and testkingers is fantastic, and has massive potential. However at the moment there are simply too many flaws.

Firstly, you begin with a 1:05 time, 5 minutes to read the intro page (that takes all of 20 seconds) and then the clock should reset to 1 hour when you click begin lab. I couldn't get into the lab for 7 minutes (getting the error message "Lab not ready, please try again") meaning I only had 58 minutes to complete the lab. But then with 2:30 left on the clock, the lab ended!

Also - the speed of the lab was so unbelieveably slow, making the use of the lab so so frustrating. Bear in mind I was the only person in the centre, i doubt the connection was heavily loaded. It got to the point that I was so frustrated I nearly prematurely ended the lab. The frustration certainly didn't help my concentration or focus. The lag meant that i had clicked a window, thought it hadn't clicked and so clicked again, then it loaded twice. Or in command prompt, i'd type 'dsadd' and it would come up as 'dsssssadd' again, wasting time and purely annoying me more. Window scrolling was unbearable due to the lag too. You couldn't see how far you had dragged the scroll bar down the page, and had to wait literally 5 seconds for the window contents to be updated. Again, annoying in the new 2008 Server Manager page.

I submitted these comments to Microsoft, so hopefully something will be done about it. In an ideal world they'd have each test centre hosting the VM locally.

A few other things I mentioned was that the Instructions (Overview and Task) were on-screen and overlapped the VM. It would be MUCH easier to be handed a printout of the tasks to refer to/cross out than to pull them up over the lab, memorise, then dock back multiple times.
Oh, and administering a server at 800x600 is a little awkward some times.

On the whole, I think that the labs certainly have potential if they were a little more pleasing to use (faster!) and it didn't take a full hour to do 30 minutes of tasks if you were at the server itself. In fact, i even didn't get the chance to finish 2 of the tasks in the first lab! If the few teething problems were ironed out, I'd be happy with labs over conventional exams

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Even though I normally do the beta exams, I passed on this as I'm sick and tired of driving 1+ hours for the next closest testing centre & to experience the troubled laced exams thru prometric (even thought the tempting offer of 3 free exam vouchers was nice). And since I've decided that I'm not going to do any more MS exams for a while, I didn't want to go thru the same hassle again

800x600, would here runs their Windows server at that res? All my servers run at 1024x768 or higher... Ah, I'm just being picky...

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